Category: Tips & Tricks

Yesterday I started out to try to turn a couple of piece of tough old meat into something flavorful, succulent and so tender that it just melts in your mouth. I smoked a couple of pretty good hunks of brisket along with a nice fat pork loin.

Just in case you have not been reading my posts from the beginning, allow me to bring you up to speed real quick on how I have finally conquered my Brinkman Offset Smoker.

For starters, I get a full chimney of charcoal briquettes going. Next I dump them into the smoke box, but closer to the smoker end of the box. Once the smoker comes up to a temperature of right around 225° it is time to start cooking.

So yesterday when I started this process (and it take me basically two days now to cook brisket the way we like it) Once the smoker was up to temp, I got the pork loin and the two briskets in the smoker. As you can see from the photo above, this puppy is capable of producing plenty of smoke.

Now, I started this about 10:00 am yesterday morning. I keep the cooking temperature right at about 225°, 250° throughout the entire cooking process. In my case, I smoked right up until dark. So the briskets cooked for about 10 hours so far. The pork loin, once it reach about 165° got wrapped in aluminum foil and left to cool on the counter.

So once I had actually finished smoking the briskets, they also go wrapped in aluminum foil and then moved over to the electric smoker and left to cook on a very low heat overnight. I have no idea what the actual cook temperature of the electric smoker was, but I would venture to guess maybe 100° . . . maybe 150.

Okay! So if you have read my review of my Masterbuilt Electric Smoker, then you know that I have not been happy with the amount of smoke I can get this thing to generate. I feel that my review was pretty fair in that this unit does a decent job of cooking whatever I stick in there at a low and slow rate, but it just does not generate the kind of smoke and thus the smoke flavor that I like.

Since winter has really set in in my area, I figured that if I am going to have any decent barbecue over the course of the winter I needed to figure out a way to get more smoke from this vertical electric smoker.

It just so happened that one afternoon I was looking around at what might be new in the way of charcoal chimneys because I think I am going to need another one come next spring. While looking at what is out and available, I got to wondering if I could make something that might be used to generate more smoke.

My problem with generating smoke in my electric smoker is that the heating element just does not generate enough heat to cause wood chips or chunks to smolder and smoke while cooking at around 225º. To get the wood to smolder, I would need to crank the heat up and for barbecue, that just won’t work.

In looking at the basic design of the charcoal chimney, I got to wondering if I could apply that to something I had around the house that could be used.